On Soccer: Manchester City and European Soccer Arrive at a Moment of Reckoning

MANCHESTER, England — Strip away the jargon and the
euphemisms and the disorientating forest of acronyms, tune
out the noise from claim and counterclaim and strident
denial, pick a way through the laborious detail and the
tangled minutiae, and a simple truth emerges: At the very
apex of European soccer, a moment of reckoning is coming.

The report last week that UEFA is studying not so much a
revamp as of its crown jewel, the Champions
League, is not an administrative story about the format of a
competition. The New York Times’s report, on Monday, that
Manchester City from that same tournament is
not a story about rule breaches or misleading financial
declarations or malicious leaks.

Both are about something far broader and, in a way, far
easier to understand. Both are about a struggle for control,
between UEFA — the body that has overseen European soccer for
decades — and the globe-straddling, extravagantly wealthy
superclubs that provide much of its revenue.

Both are about power, and who can exert it. And both are
about who runs soccer — on whose behalf, and for whose
benefit.

To recap: Last Wednesday, a UEFA document came to light, one
that of what the Champions League,
soccer’s most glamorous, most lucrative, most exalted club
competition, might become.

It set out what would be a fundamentally different tournament
to the one that currently occupies screens and minds: 24
teams would, under the proposal, no longer have to qualify
for the Champions League through domestic competition. They
would become, essentially, a permanent class of Champions
League teams, a continental superleague in all but name, and
the death knell, , the outgoing chairman of the
Premier League, of more than a century of domestic soccer.

And then, on Monday, as they were still clearing up the
detritus left at the Etihad Stadium by Manchester City fans
celebrating a second successive Premier League title, The
Times that the body investigating suggestions
that the club had misled UEFA financial regulators over its
commercial income was expected to recommend that City be
sanctioned for its transgressions. The punishment could be as
harsh as a season-long ban from the Champions League, the
tournament whose trophy the club’s ownership group prizes
above all others.

It is easy to become detached from stories like these. They
have an air of remoteness, a whiff of futurology. It is
tempting to file them as somewhere between soothsaying and
speculation. A chorus of voices, each offering a different
tangent, strikes up as soon as they appear. The facts are
easily lost in the .

Last week, in the midst of possibly the most dramatic few
days the Champions League in its current incarnation has ever
produced, most of Europe’s major leagues came out against the
plan to change the competition. UEFA immediately insisted it
was just part of a consultation process. Everyone would get a
say. It was just an idea. Nothing was set in stone. The panic
abated. The fury faded. Nothing changed, not immediately:
, the Champions League was
still as good as ever. The world turned.

On Tuesday, Manchester City of any wrongdoing at all. Ever since the
accusations first surfaced on the Football Leaks
whistle-blowing platform, the club has steadfastly dismissed
all allegations that it deliberately inflated sponsorship
deals in order to comply with the so-called financial fair
play regulations UEFA created to govern clubs’ spending.

In a statement that described the accusation of any financial
regularities as “entirely false,” City said it was extremely
concerned by the fact The Times had cited “people familiar
with the case.”

Either the club’s “good faith” in the independent
investigators reporting to UEFA was misplaced, Manchester
City said, or the process was being “misrepresented by
individuals intent on damaging the club’s reputation and its
commercial interests. Or both.” UEFA did not comment on the
Times article.

Focusing on the existence of the leaks, though, misses the
point, just as the debate over the validity of financial fair
play rules — whether European soccer needs someone telling
its owners how to spend their money — does, and just as the
dispute over whether the Champions League would be better or
worse if it was played on a Saturday did a week or so ago.

It is not ridiculous to think that F.F.P. is an inherently
anti-competitive measure. It is not absurd to believe that
owners should be allowed to spend whatever they like on their
plaything, and it is not crazy to feel that clubs should be
allowed to gamble their very existences on the whim of a
benefactor, or that the whole edifice was designed to
protect, and enshrine, the primacy of the established elite.
Perhaps the rules, as they currently stand, are wrong.

The converse is true, too: There is a perfectly logical case
to be made that F.F.P. is a good thing, that clubs should
have to live within their means, that longstanding sporting
and social institutions being deployed as vanity projects or
soft-power plays or reputation-laundering devices for regimes
with questionable human rights records is less than ideal.
Perhaps the rules are the rules, and the clubs should have to
abide by them, while lobbying to get them changed, rather
than just picking and choosing which ones they like.

Equally, maybe the Champions League would be better if
Europe’s giants played one another more frequently. Maybe it
would be in the best interests of the game if high-profile
European games were played on weekends, and domestic fixtures
in midweek. Maybe the handful of teams from Greece and Poland
and Belgium who make it are just a waste of time.

Or maybe not. Maybe Europe’s elite clubs — who had, after
all, conjured an idea for what the Champions League should
look like that was eerily, entirely coincidentally, similar
to the idea UEFA — are in danger of overestimating
their own place in the firmament. Maybe changing the
Champions League is killing the golden goose. Maybe it works
as it is, and it does not need to be altered.

It is perfectly feasible to make a case for all of the above,
but the question of which of them is most convincing — which
of them, if any, is correct — is not the most pressing. It is
the fact that these questions have, now, to be asked, that
matters most. The significance of the plan to change the
Champions League runs beyond its potential impact on domestic
tournaments. The consequences of Manchester City’s possibly
being banned from European competition run much further than
its Etihad Stadium.

In both cases, something far deeper is at stake. These
stories, at their heart, once everything else is stripped
away — the acronyms and the arguments and all the rest — are
about who will get to run European soccer, whose voice
carries the most weight, and who answers to whom.

Realigning the Champions League to suit the demands of the
biggest, richest clubs (as of 2019) might come under UEFA’s
banner, but it would not be at UEFA’s behest. It would
suggest that the power, really, lies with the superclubs;
that they can shape the competitions they enter to their
benefit; that UEFA is now just a brand, a rubber-stamp, an
administrator, a licensing commission.

If UEFA failed to listen to the recommendations of its own
investigators — if a ban for City is the sanction they seek —
it would prove that F.F.P., meanwhile, is effectively
finished, that the rising elite of Manchester City and Paris
St.-Germain, backed by Abu Dhabi and Qatar, have been right
to flout the rules; that those clubs who built their business
models around the new reality have been foolish; that
Aleksander Ceferin, the UEFA president elected by a
consortium of associations from Central and Eastern Europe,
away from the big five leagues, could not withstand the
pressure of the big money and the old elite; that,
ultimately, UEFA did not heed its own investigators, and that
it could or would not enforce its own rules.

That is the clarity; all the rest is fug.

Maybe that is all for the best. Maybe it would be better if
UEFA was not the ultimate source of power in European soccer
any longer. Maybe it is time to accept that what is good for
the Premier League, or P.S.G., is not the same thing as is
good for Bulgaria, and Lokomotiv Plovdiv. Maybe the era of
broad churches and consensus is over. Maybe it is time to cut
the smaller countries loose, to stop even the pretense of
sharing the wealth.

Or maybe it is not. Maybe handing over control of the game to
a cartel of superclubs, or allowing nation states to run
teams according to their own, unchecked desires, risks
disenfranchising everyone outside that small cabal.

Maybe the game should be run for the elite. Maybe the game
should be run for everyone. Either way, we approach a
crossroads. The direction we eventually travel will tell us
more than how many Champions League games will be played on
the weekend, or whether Manchester City will feature in them.
It will tell us where, precisely, the power now lies.

Rory Smith is the chief soccer correspondent, based in
Manchester, England. He covers all aspects of European
soccer and has reported from three World Cups, the
Olympics, and numerous European tournaments.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page
B8 of the New York edition with
the headline: European Game at Crossroads Amid Pitched
Power Struggle. | |

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